Interview with Peter Kazinczy, Vice President Sales at Cinnober Financial Systems

Q: How is your company using MySQL?

Cinnober, founded in 1998 in Sweden, offers a complete technology platform for financial trading, with customers including the Chicago Board Options Exchange, NYSE Liffe and London Metal Exchange. MySQL is a key element of the solution, deployed in the heart of the exchange systems.

Q: What are the key requirements for a mission critical financial platform?

1. High-Availability: Obviously, this is a top requirement, and the architecture of the solution needs to address it.
2. Ultra low latency: Speed is crucial to any marketplace that wants to remain competitive. Moreover, with high frequency trading gaining an increasing share of overall volumes, the ability to manage constantly rising transaction volumes is also a necessity.
3. Scalability: The amount of orders and transactions per second that we can manage without affecting the response times.
4. Flexibility: The ability to expand while delivering new functionalities according to specific needs e.g. functions like iceberg orders and pegged orders as desired in numerous markets.

Q: Why did you choose to use MySQL?

Compared with other databases, we can reach the levels of performance we need at a fraction of the costs. Furthermore, each solution deployed will be highly customized based on customers’ specific needs as well as financial regulations in the given customer country. MySQL’s incomparable ease of use and administration makes it much easier and faster to deploy customized applications on top of our standard Java based trading platform.

Q: Why did you choose to purchase the MySQL Enterprise subscription?

For a mission critical solution like ours, it was a no brainer. The MySQL Enterprise subscription offering includes comprehensive support, and we have considerably benefited from the deep expertise of Oracle’s MySQL support specialists. We have for example implemented MySQL at Burgundy, which is a stock exchange based in Stockholm, and a competitor to Nasdaq OMX.

Q: Is your company also using other Oracle products?

Yes, we have customers relying on Oracle database and on Sun hardware.

Q: Can you describe the IT-infrastructure?

Yes, here’s an example of the configuration. When there’s three of the same “boxes” it means that there are one or more servers. MySQL is used to store all reference data including tradable instruments and users. This data is distributed to all the server processes that need it. The whole system is partitioned to achieve scalability.

Q: Plans for the future?

We are very satisfied with MySQL. Our applications are 100% built on Java and we want to continue building our solutions with open standards and, when applicable, open source technologies. We will likely also provide more applications in the future. For instance, we recently launched a real time clearing & settlement application.

Thank you Mr Kazinczy!

More information

Cinnober – Solutions for demanding trading and clearing venues »

Whitepaper on Latency »